For a cross country coach to be able to answer an athlete who asks, “how well did I race today?”, the coach needs to know a few things in addition to that athlete's time and place in the race. In order to be able to evaluate any cross country performance relative to a universal standard the coach needs to have two more pieces of information.                1) an exact and standardized course length, and        2) some way of quantitatively knowing the difficulty of the course.For the same reason, identical race times run on different courses are seldom equivalent performances. Comparing them objectively also requires the same additional information. However, currently there are no known systems which are capable of providing such information.        
The invention is directed to overcoming one or more of the problems as set forth above.